GMWU General Secretary Abdul- Moomin Gbana
THE GHANA Mineworkers Union of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) has appealed to the government to as a matter of urgency put in place robust measures to curtail the increasing rate of fatalities among other hazards in the mining sector.
The group, in a statement noted that Ghana, as a prominent hub of mining in Africa, stands the risk of having the “notorious trend of mine accidents and incidents with their consequential fatalities happening in some of the underground operations” to become a blot on her enviable record chalked over the years, citing AngloGold Ashanti, Obuasi Mines, and its surrogate Underground Mining Alliance which according to them, has claimed three precious lives since June 2020.
The group posited that as a trade union organisation that has for the past 75 years sought the protection and welfare of its members, it takes an “uncompromising opposition to this worrying and preventable trend of fatalities that are shedding the blood of innocent workers in atonement for the profiteering motives of these multinational corporations.”
“The Ghana Mineworkers’ Union will not countenance any more of these avoidable deaths,” they said, and threatened to “not hesitate to withdraw our services if urgent and robust steps are not taken to eliminate and prevent these needless accidents from becoming a recurrent feature of the workplace.”
The group, therefore, demanded for a full-scale tripartite investigation – involving government, the Ghana Chamber of Mines as well as the Union – into the frequent occurrences of mine accidents; and also urged the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources and by extension the Minerals Commission and its Inspectorate Division to as a matter of urgency conduct a thorough investigation into the recent underground accident that saw three of its members working in the same area trapped, out of which two managed to escape and one still missing since Tuesday, May 18, 2021.
The union again called on government to prioritise the ratification of the ILO Convention 176 (Safety and Health in the Mines Convention) in order to further tighten and align the industry’s health and safety regulatory framework to globally acceptable standards.
By Nii Adjei Mensahfio